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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sammael" data-source="post: 5130254" data-attributes="member: 4475">AFAIK, the word "extreme" is an accepted scientific term for a data point that's as far away from the "middle ground" as possible, hence my use of the term do describe both "all sandbox, all the time" and "all railroad, all the time." It's quite obvious (to me, at least) that the middle ground is a mix of the two which, from my experience, makes for the best experience in a varied group of people.  Incidentally, I think the two can be objectively categorized as extremes if we imagine an axis labeled "structure," with "sandbox" all the way left (unstructured) and "railroad" all the way right (structured). It's just an easy way to visualise it. As for "homogeneous," I once played (very briefly) with a group that wanted to re-create the Dragonlance novels verbatim in their game. Aside from me, the group was pretty homogeneous in their desire - and they obviously wanted to be railroaded as much as possible. So, such groups do exist, they're just very rare. You never played under a GM who, for example, insisted on running railroady AP adventures as written? I agree that once a player's gotten a taste of a particular GM's style, that player can always decide not to play under that GM if their styles don't mesh. But there are plenty of examples of people who continue playing because they want to socialize with their circle of friends, or because that's the only game in town, or because there are some elements of the game that they still like.  Both Planescape and Dark Sun had heavy metaplots that eventually destroyed both campaign settings. The metaplots weren't included in the base campaign settings, though. It's worth noting that the original (Gray Box) FR campaign setting was completely metaplot-free and was, in fact, a perfect sandbox setting. But fans asked for metaplots, and TSR delivered...</blockquote>

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